Los Angeles history

Matt Weinstock, Nov. 30, 1959

The Education Race

Ever since the Russians launched their first Sputnik there has been a furor in American education.

It has been charged that students graduate from high school without a knowledge of fundamentals necessary in today's society.

It has also been stated that they are coddled and that schooling to most of them is little more than a pleasant social experience. If we are to meet Russia on equal terms, the outcry goes, we must tighten up, particularly in math and science.

Let us now pay attention to the mother of a child in a west side junior high school.

The school has an extremely high IQ average. As a result, this mother says, the courses have been geared to the talents of the "brains" -- the 15% who excel. She says this is unfair, unkind and undemocratic.

"You would be surprised at the number of students at this school who are being tutored, just to make a C," she says. "Of course, the parents of some students can't afford it. Some tutors ask $5.50 an hour."

She goes on:

"One mother took her eighth-grade daughter to a physician because of the girl's nervous state caused by her inability to keep up with her studies. Now the girl takes tranquilizers."

The parents, by the way, don't blame the teachers, who frequently sympathize with the youngsters. They blame "the system."

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IT'S IMPOSSIBLE to keep up with the accounts of increased real estate values but Ralph Jester has a little beauty. Ralph, who designed the costumes for Yul and Gina in "Solomon and Sheba," moved to Portuguese Bend in 1934. Five years ago a parcel of land he knows about there was priced at $800 an acre. It is now offered at $35,000 an acre. No, he didn't snap up any of it.

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UP TO DATEThe modern girl is not impressed With knights in shining hardware,She likes to see her suitors dressedIn styles the avant garde wear. --EDITH OGUTSCH

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A FEW DAYS AGO a plaintive cry went out from here. Emil Cuhel had photographed a pretty Eskimo gal -- well, anyway, a pretty gal in a parka -- for a Christmas card. But no one, not even the people at the libraries, knew how to say "Merry Christmas" in Eskimo. So the question was asked here. After all, Alaska is now the 49th state and must assume its proper share of the Christmas madness.

Well, Hedda Sherman saw the item and suggested that the Eskimos brought down from Alaska for the film "Ice Palace," which her husband Vincent is directing at Warner Brothers, might know. Sure enough, Chester Seveck, 70, chief herder of the government's 5,500 reindeer near Pt. Hope, has come through. Merry Christmas in Eskimo is "Chreeseema Ek Pin."

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THE WAY Betsy Duncan tells it, a jet transport en route from New York to Los Angeles was somewhere over the Southwest when the pilot came on the intercom and said quietly, "Ladies and gentlemen, I think you should know that we have lost most of our power. We're at 5,000 feet and we're losing 100 feet a second. However, I have contacted Phoenix airport and a foam coating has been put on the runway. Ambulances from as far as Tucson are on the way and fire engines all the way from Wickenburg. I want to assure you that every precaution has been taken for your safety . . . This is a recording."

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AT RANDOM -- The movie and TV scene that irks Leonard Schulman is the one in which the hero, driving a car, unnecessarily twists and turns the steering wheel as if he were on a narrow, winding mountain road.